No; there is a clear cultural trend towards nihilism. It may be a(n over) reaction to a prior overly sanitised and politically correct era brought on in part by the Comics Code. The same undercurrents are present in most major media - movies, music, art etc. This 'race to the bottom' has been pretty much taken to its extremes now, so I look forward to the pendulum (hopefully) swinging the other way again soon. But given the way cynicism, boorishness and not caring are 'in', that people can't seem to tell the difference between cynicism and intelligence anymore, and that developing the intelligence to do so is not 'in', I'm not sure it will.
About 4 seconds of Googling shows this kind of thing has happened before and can happen, e.g. this incident. Not really a commercial airliner in that case, but it could just as well have been.
I don't know what your definition of "powerful" is, but I would venture to guess that if pitted against one another militarily, the USA would kick the Roman Empire's ass. Tanks, fighter jets and bombers, GPS targetting, guns, automatic rifles, napalm, nukes, satellite tracking, unmanned aerial surveillance, night-vision, radio communication, radar, guided and long-distance missiles.... the Romans wouldn't stand a chance. In terms of land area and population the USA is also MUCH larger than the Roman Empire was even at its peak. The USA has also seen more technical innovation and scientific progress over its much shorter lifespan than was seen under the Roman Empire. We cannot compare duration of existence because we don't know long the USA will continue to exist.
So by what measure are you comparing?
The Roman Empire also happens to be a poor champion of your underlying point, given its patriachal nature, discrimination of women etc. Under Roman Law, the man (and btw, they were white) was the head of a household and family, and was accordingly granted much power in this role that is unthinkable today - for example, for much of Roman history, it was even legal for a man to kill his wife or children. So another powerful patriarchal white male society actually would seem to reinforce the GP's point rather than rebuke it.
I must admit I haven't read any of the thousands of independent proper scientific papers that keep on showing over and over in multiple different domains and research areas and parts of the world that we have a serious mostly-man-made problem on our hands, so I can't really comment on the details - I presume you've read most of the papers, since you seem to understand how it works and why virtually every single climate model is flawed. Anyway, I nonetheless do think there is cause for at least a fair amount of alarmism (and thus more intense research remains warranted) even if the current global warming is 99.999% natural --- why? Simply because the Earth is now operating under *entirely* different conditions from every previous +/- 100,000 year warming cycle. For example, during the previous peaks, the planet had things like rainforests which very possibly played a huge part in bringing the CO2 back under control each time. Very very shortly (e.g. by 2050), we are going to have effectively no rainforest left... so the situation is ENTIRELY different to previous peaks, regardless, and we NEED to know how this is going to affect how things pan out. Other examples include a significantly changing ocean ecology (plankton/algae levels etc.).
No matter what, red flags should be going up all over the bloody place, and we must research and understand this thing as best as humanly possible, no matter what is causing it.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 1
I think you're confusing "looks nice" with "improved". "Leaps and bounds"? That's ridiculous - what on earth are you basing that on? At best it's a tiny incremental change over 2003. Office 2007 is a horrible abomination. I've been using it for nearly a year already and it still makes me want to stick needles in my eyes every time I have to use it. The interface is crap, and it has virtually no compelling new features (all I can think of is that the compare tool has been improved a bit... what else?). I can say one thing for it, it's made me use OpenOffice quite a bit more.
Funny, I've re-read it a few times and I just cannot see anything in Token_Internet_Girl's post that claims or even insinuates that every woman writes "soap opera emo trash" or that all comic book readers are men. Where did you get that? It also seems you may not have noticed the poster is a woman.
Give it up already and admit you were wrong and that such women exist, and stop attacking and blaming in a pitbull-like manner anyone who confirms that they do --- God, what is wrong with you? --- while most aren't, I've met a few women over the years who definitely ARE like this, in quite high up places out here in the real world (e.g. in publishing).
And don't complain that somebody was "bullying" this woman who just happened to succeed - it wasn't just a random attack suggesting she's PC just because she's a woman, rather, this woman came in SPECIFICALLY on a *platform* of complaining about how sexist the traditional writing has been - it's her STATED AGENDA to rectify this.
I don't believe anyone is denying that there are natural non-man-made temperature cycles; that has minimal bearing on the fact that in addition to those we're having a massive effect on the climate. Pointing to a natural cycle doesn't somehow "prove" that we're not, it's not as if it's one or the other.
Or, gee, it could be the 3000 year old philosophy, of which The Matrix is a miniscule speck of nothing in terms of philosophical interest and contributes nothing new... honestly, what irritated me the most about that movie was that suddenly everyone was running around spouting what amounts to half an hour of Philosophy 101 as if it was something amazing and new and deep. Predictably this thread is full of incorrect allusions to The Matrix being the source of this idea.
It's a simulation of evolution and is definitely NOT creationism, at least not in the Christian sense, which posits that we were created by God (unless God created the simulation), and MOST certainly not in the literal-interpretation-of-the-Bible sense at all. Even if God created the simulation, the simulation still contains evolution, so you have a false dichotomy there, it isn't "one or the other" to begin with (in fact it's a false dichotomy regardless if we're in a VR world). Basically evolution remains a FACT in our universe, simulated or not; the only remaining question is who created the sim (if there is one) and how.
Depending on your definition of 'matter', probably not. But presuming we figure out it is a simulation, there exists a possibility this could lead us to explore, and find, exploitable properties of the simulation that allow us to take advantage and have more fun... for example perhaps there's a 'bug' or property that'll allow me to hook up with Scarlett Johansonn whenever I want:) So I'd know it wasn't real, who cares. If we don't explore the "VR" possibility, we may not be so inclined to uncover such exploitable properties.
Believe it or not, hearing voices is surprisingly common and not even cognitively interesting. Many normal, perfectly-not-crazy people just live with it; you don't often hear about it because there's such a stigma around it - people assume voice hearers are crazy, but it's apparently quite normal, and apparently one of the most common forms of (natural) hallucination. Check out the "Hearing Voices Movement" article on Wikipedia; one thing of interest pertinent to your situation:
"70% of voice hearers reported that their voices had begun after a severe traumatic or intensely emotional event, such as an accident, divorce or bereavement, sexual or physical abuse, love affairs, or pregnancy"
If you're looking for an 'excuse to believe in God' - perhaps to be more accepted by others (I know I've done that kind of thing in the past) - you're welcome to make use of your experience to do so, although Occam's razor suggests dozens of more plausible and rational explanations.
I have also been in horrible situations where I could say I 'should have died or been seriously injured', and have never, ever heard voices of any kind at all.
Put simply, let's suppose you do prove that it's a simulation. You write a paper about it, and you publish it in a major scientific journal. Fine, then the simulation notices. It subtly alters your results, inserting fnords [wikipedia.org] (which really work, as they can directly control anyone's brain) into every published copy, and altering everyone's memory to suggest that your experiment had either failed utterly, or proved conclusively that the Universe was not a simulation.
OK, but what if the simulation creators just don't care if we find out, or for some other reason don't mind if we do? Why are you assuming they necessarily would? The fact that seemingly without exception everybody seems to assume that a simulation *would* always try to hide its existence from us seems to prove to me that we are in a simulation as it must be inserting 'fnords' into everyone's brains to force them to make this stupid assumption in order that we never find the bugs in the simulation that could allow us to discover it...
Further, any flaw exposed in the VR simulation could be corrected without our knowing, because our experiences, including our memories and even the flow of time, are also wholly within the realm of control of the VR simulation.
Sure it could, but there is no reason to assume that it WOULD; perhaps its designers just don't mind if we find out, or perhaps they aren't even good enough at Universe simulations to prevent us from finding out. Maybe the entire simulation is to see if we can figure it out. Who knows? The possibily exists; it would be senseless to exclude it - you seem to be making a huge assumption that it would specifically be perfectly designed to prevent us from discovering it.
As soon as you start saying, "Well this could be a simulation" then you have to throw out all knowledge that comes to you through sense data. ALL of it
Why? Is it simply impossible that the simulation has consistent "rules" within it? I don't think so. Heck, even science doesn't assume the 'rules' remain constant - they just seemingly most probably have so far based on the evidence.
It is an absolutely unfalsifiable premise and is therefore unscientific.
It is unfalsifiable IF, and ONLY IF it is true that the VR has been designed to block our attempts at discovering it, AND is perfect at doing so. None of these are necessarily the case; it may either be imperfect, or the VR's designers may very well simply be OK with us 'discovering' it (why are you assuming they wouldn't!??? Are we all programmed to assume that by the VR? That would seem to prove its existence, because such assumptions are ridiculous - ha ha.)
Seriously, if the VR is designed such that we cannot ever figure it out, then sure, this isn't "science", but that massive assumption could just as easily be false, and if there are thusly ways that would allow us to discover it, then this definitely remains science. (In fact, science may even continue, just extending to the 'real real world' beyond.)
Another another way to look at it is that approx 1 in 15 machines is running Linux - 0.63% sounds low, but expressed as "1 in 15 machines", that actually doesn't sound so bad to me at all, considering. And given that's a fairly significant number of computers by any measure, I'd say that the fact that it's doubled *is* also significant.
What if we assume the possibility that the creators of the VR simulation wouldn't mind if we "figured it out"? Then surely it's worth testing the theory anyway? I mean, why is everybody assuming that the creators of such a simulation would necessarily try to prevent us from finding out that we're just virtual beings in the simulation? It could also be that their simulation has *flaws* in it that could allow us to discover it --- I mean, why does everybody seem to assume that the simulation would also be perfect? I mean, if we tried to create similar kinds of simulations, we'd probably also make mistakes, or we might want to see if our creations "figured it out" and allow them to etc.
Only if we assume that (a) the simulation is perfect AND (b) the creators don't want us to know and will actively try to prevent us from finding out, THEN we'd be wasting our time, but neither of these two are necessarily the case.
To turn a phrase that used to be used to criticise Linux: A Windows PC is only cheaper than a Mac if your time has no value. I've blown easily two weeks getting this turd Vista to run half-properly, and it's still a joke.
Such comparisons as yours also readily neglect that even an equivalently-specced Windows machine is ALWAYS going to run slower because you have to run realtime anti-virus and anti-malware apps - in other words, you inherently need a faster CPU and hard disk and more memory on the Windows machine to get parity with OS X.
OS X vs Linux, well that's another comparison entirely.
Well, it's a tricky issue. I do think anyone should be allowed to at least express on an Internet forum what they think the priorities should be; it seems unlikely that those that divide out the budget read the slashdot comments to make their decisions. On one hand though you could argue that taxpayers who are funding the research should collectively get to decide, on the other hand that could lead to bad mob mentality type of decisions, where in fact you want somebody presumably 'smarter' to decide. But different people will always have different priorities. I for example am (as I admitted elsewhere) "biased" here towards folding@home simply because I have a deadly protein misfolding disease that runs in my family for which I'd urgently like to see a cure. In fact, you running folding@home could literally help save my life - it's as DIRECT as that.
But there are still other ways to look at it. Running folding@home might, for example, help save a budding scientist who goes on to in some other way help discover / pioneer / fund research for contact with alien races. But on the other other hand, if we make contact with highly advanced aliens (a long shot), they themselves may even *share* the technologies and methods for curing cancer and the disease in my family (like lottery here - very long shot, but potentially big benefit).
There is no one "right" way of directing funding though. If you direct it in one direction, somebody will suffer. If you direct it elsewhere, someone *else* will suffer, comparatively.
It's true that there is potentially enough research money to fund ALL OF IT --- but the problem IS, like you said, it's being blown on stupid wars.
Slashdot Mirror
No; there is a clear cultural trend towards nihilism. It may be a(n over) reaction to a prior overly sanitised and politically correct era brought on in part by the Comics Code. The same undercurrents are present in most major media - movies, music, art etc. This 'race to the bottom' has been pretty much taken to its extremes now, so I look forward to the pendulum (hopefully) swinging the other way again soon. But given the way cynicism, boorishness and not caring are 'in', that people can't seem to tell the difference between cynicism and intelligence anymore, and that developing the intelligence to do so is not 'in', I'm not sure it will.
About 4 seconds of Googling shows this kind of thing has happened before and can happen, e.g. this incident. Not really a commercial airliner in that case, but it could just as well have been.
I don't know what your definition of "powerful" is, but I would venture to guess that if pitted against one another militarily, the USA would kick the Roman Empire's ass. Tanks, fighter jets and bombers, GPS targetting, guns, automatic rifles, napalm, nukes, satellite tracking, unmanned aerial surveillance, night-vision, radio communication, radar, guided and long-distance missiles .... the Romans wouldn't stand a chance. In terms of land area and population the USA is also MUCH larger than the Roman Empire was even at its peak. The USA has also seen more technical innovation and scientific progress over its much shorter lifespan than was seen under the Roman Empire. We cannot compare duration of existence because we don't know long the USA will continue to exist.
So by what measure are you comparing?
The Roman Empire also happens to be a poor champion of your underlying point, given its patriachal nature, discrimination of women etc. Under Roman Law, the man (and btw, they were white) was the head of a household and family, and was accordingly granted much power in this role that is unthinkable today - for example, for much of Roman history, it was even legal for a man to kill his wife or children. So another powerful patriarchal white male society actually would seem to reinforce the GP's point rather than rebuke it.
I must admit I haven't read any of the thousands of independent proper scientific papers that keep on showing over and over in multiple different domains and research areas and parts of the world that we have a serious mostly-man-made problem on our hands, so I can't really comment on the details - I presume you've read most of the papers, since you seem to understand how it works and why virtually every single climate model is flawed. Anyway, I nonetheless do think there is cause for at least a fair amount of alarmism (and thus more intense research remains warranted) even if the current global warming is 99.999% natural --- why? Simply because the Earth is now operating under *entirely* different conditions from every previous +/- 100,000 year warming cycle. For example, during the previous peaks, the planet had things like rainforests which very possibly played a huge part in bringing the CO2 back under control each time. Very very shortly (e.g. by 2050), we are going to have effectively no rainforest left ... so the situation is ENTIRELY different to previous peaks, regardless, and we NEED to know how this is going to affect how things pan out. Other examples include a significantly changing ocean ecology (plankton/algae levels etc.).
No matter what, red flags should be going up all over the bloody place, and we must research and understand this thing as best as humanly possible, no matter what is causing it.
I think you're confusing "looks nice" with "improved". "Leaps and bounds"? That's ridiculous - what on earth are you basing that on? At best it's a tiny incremental change over 2003. Office 2007 is a horrible abomination. I've been using it for nearly a year already and it still makes me want to stick needles in my eyes every time I have to use it. The interface is crap, and it has virtually no compelling new features (all I can think of is that the compare tool has been improved a bit ... what else?). I can say one thing for it, it's made me use OpenOffice quite a bit more.
But it's never been the "core" of the writing, even though it existed, the vastly predominant aspects are action and storyline/plot.
Funny, I've re-read it a few times and I just cannot see anything in Token_Internet_Girl's post that claims or even insinuates that every woman writes "soap opera emo trash" or that all comic book readers are men. Where did you get that? It also seems you may not have noticed the poster is a woman.
Give it up already and admit you were wrong and that such women exist, and stop attacking and blaming in a pitbull-like manner anyone who confirms that they do --- God, what is wrong with you? --- while most aren't, I've met a few women over the years who definitely ARE like this, in quite high up places out here in the real world (e.g. in publishing).
And don't complain that somebody was "bullying" this woman who just happened to succeed - it wasn't just a random attack suggesting she's PC just because she's a woman, rather, this woman came in SPECIFICALLY on a *platform* of complaining about how sexist the traditional writing has been - it's her STATED AGENDA to rectify this.
I don't believe anyone is denying that there are natural non-man-made temperature cycles; that has minimal bearing on the fact that in addition to those we're having a massive effect on the climate. Pointing to a natural cycle doesn't somehow "prove" that we're not, it's not as if it's one or the other.
There's a big difference between watching a webcam girl over the Internet, and actually being there ...
Or, gee, it could be the 3000 year old philosophy, of which The Matrix is a miniscule speck of nothing in terms of philosophical interest and contributes nothing new ... honestly, what irritated me the most about that movie was that suddenly everyone was running around spouting what amounts to half an hour of Philosophy 101 as if it was something amazing and new and deep. Predictably this thread is full of incorrect allusions to The Matrix being the source of this idea.
evolution, or creationism
It's a simulation of evolution and is definitely NOT creationism, at least not in the Christian sense, which posits that we were created by God (unless God created the simulation), and MOST certainly not in the literal-interpretation-of-the-Bible sense at all. Even if God created the simulation, the simulation still contains evolution, so you have a false dichotomy there, it isn't "one or the other" to begin with (in fact it's a false dichotomy regardless if we're in a VR world). Basically evolution remains a FACT in our universe, simulated or not; the only remaining question is who created the sim (if there is one) and how.
Depending on your definition of 'matter', probably not. But presuming we figure out it is a simulation, there exists a possibility this could lead us to explore, and find, exploitable properties of the simulation that allow us to take advantage and have more fun ... for example perhaps there's a 'bug' or property that'll allow me to hook up with Scarlett Johansonn whenever I want :) So I'd know it wasn't real, who cares. If we don't explore the "VR" possibility, we may not be so inclined to uncover such exploitable properties.
Heh, I think that was explored in The Truman Show.
Believe it or not, hearing voices is surprisingly common and not even cognitively interesting. Many normal, perfectly-not-crazy people just live with it; you don't often hear about it because there's such a stigma around it - people assume voice hearers are crazy, but it's apparently quite normal, and apparently one of the most common forms of (natural) hallucination. Check out the "Hearing Voices Movement" article on Wikipedia; one thing of interest pertinent to your situation:
"70% of voice hearers reported that their voices had begun after a severe traumatic or intensely emotional event, such as an accident, divorce or bereavement, sexual or physical abuse, love affairs, or pregnancy"
If you're looking for an 'excuse to believe in God' - perhaps to be more accepted by others (I know I've done that kind of thing in the past) - you're welcome to make use of your experience to do so, although Occam's razor suggests dozens of more plausible and rational explanations.
I have also been in horrible situations where I could say I 'should have died or been seriously injured', and have never, ever heard voices of any kind at all.
That's beside the point, as it could just as easily be an 'experimenter' 'bot' running in a virtual world figuring it out.
Put simply, let's suppose you do prove that it's a simulation. You write a paper about it, and you publish it in a major scientific journal. Fine, then the simulation notices. It subtly alters your results, inserting fnords [wikipedia.org] (which really work, as they can directly control anyone's brain) into every published copy, and altering everyone's memory to suggest that your experiment had either failed utterly, or proved conclusively that the Universe was not a simulation.
OK, but what if the simulation creators just don't care if we find out, or for some other reason don't mind if we do? Why are you assuming they necessarily would? The fact that seemingly without exception everybody seems to assume that a simulation *would* always try to hide its existence from us seems to prove to me that we are in a simulation as it must be inserting 'fnords' into everyone's brains to force them to make this stupid assumption in order that we never find the bugs in the simulation that could allow us to discover it ...
Further, any flaw exposed in the VR simulation could be corrected without our knowing, because our experiences, including our memories and even the flow of time, are also wholly within the realm of control of the VR simulation.
Sure it could, but there is no reason to assume that it WOULD; perhaps its designers just don't mind if we find out, or perhaps they aren't even good enough at Universe simulations to prevent us from finding out. Maybe the entire simulation is to see if we can figure it out. Who knows? The possibily exists; it would be senseless to exclude it - you seem to be making a huge assumption that it would specifically be perfectly designed to prevent us from discovering it.
As soon as you start saying, "Well this could be a simulation" then you have to throw out all knowledge that comes to you through sense data. ALL of it
Why? Is it simply impossible that the simulation has consistent "rules" within it? I don't think so. Heck, even science doesn't assume the 'rules' remain constant - they just seemingly most probably have so far based on the evidence.
It is an absolutely unfalsifiable premise and is therefore unscientific.
It is unfalsifiable IF, and ONLY IF it is true that the VR has been designed to block our attempts at discovering it, AND is perfect at doing so. None of these are necessarily the case; it may either be imperfect, or the VR's designers may very well simply be OK with us 'discovering' it (why are you assuming they wouldn't!??? Are we all programmed to assume that by the VR? That would seem to prove its existence, because such assumptions are ridiculous - ha ha.)
Seriously, if the VR is designed such that we cannot ever figure it out, then sure, this isn't "science", but that massive assumption could just as easily be false, and if there are thusly ways that would allow us to discover it, then this definitely remains science. (In fact, science may even continue, just extending to the 'real real world' beyond.)
I'm off by an order of magnitude, it's about 1 in 158 machines. That's still a lot of computers, but doesn't look so great. At least it's increasing.
Another another way to look at it is that approx 1 in 15 machines is running Linux - 0.63% sounds low, but expressed as "1 in 15 machines", that actually doesn't sound so bad to me at all, considering. And given that's a fairly significant number of computers by any measure, I'd say that the fact that it's doubled *is* also significant.
What if we assume the possibility that the creators of the VR simulation wouldn't mind if we "figured it out"? Then surely it's worth testing the theory anyway? I mean, why is everybody assuming that the creators of such a simulation would necessarily try to prevent us from finding out that we're just virtual beings in the simulation? It could also be that their simulation has *flaws* in it that could allow us to discover it --- I mean, why does everybody seem to assume that the simulation would also be perfect? I mean, if we tried to create similar kinds of simulations, we'd probably also make mistakes, or we might want to see if our creations "figured it out" and allow them to etc.
Only if we assume that (a) the simulation is perfect AND (b) the creators don't want us to know and will actively try to prevent us from finding out, THEN we'd be wasting our time, but neither of these two are necessarily the case.
To turn a phrase that used to be used to criticise Linux: A Windows PC is only cheaper than a Mac if your time has no value. I've blown easily two weeks getting this turd Vista to run half-properly, and it's still a joke.
Such comparisons as yours also readily neglect that even an equivalently-specced Windows machine is ALWAYS going to run slower because you have to run realtime anti-virus and anti-malware apps - in other words, you inherently need a faster CPU and hard disk and more memory on the Windows machine to get parity with OS X.
OS X vs Linux, well that's another comparison entirely.
Well, it's a tricky issue. I do think anyone should be allowed to at least express on an Internet forum what they think the priorities should be; it seems unlikely that those that divide out the budget read the slashdot comments to make their decisions. On one hand though you could argue that taxpayers who are funding the research should collectively get to decide, on the other hand that could lead to bad mob mentality type of decisions, where in fact you want somebody presumably 'smarter' to decide. But different people will always have different priorities. I for example am (as I admitted elsewhere) "biased" here towards folding@home simply because I have a deadly protein misfolding disease that runs in my family for which I'd urgently like to see a cure. In fact, you running folding@home could literally help save my life - it's as DIRECT as that.
But there are still other ways to look at it. Running folding@home might, for example, help save a budding scientist who goes on to in some other way help discover / pioneer / fund research for contact with alien races. But on the other other hand, if we make contact with highly advanced aliens (a long shot), they themselves may even *share* the technologies and methods for curing cancer and the disease in my family (like lottery here - very long shot, but potentially big benefit).
There is no one "right" way of directing funding though. If you direct it in one direction, somebody will suffer. If you direct it elsewhere, someone *else* will suffer, comparatively.
It's true that there is potentially enough research money to fund ALL OF IT --- but the problem IS, like you said, it's being blown on stupid wars.